Seriously. The heart. It has a purpose.

[othellia.livejournal.com]

I'm not exactly sure when I started becoming a vampire biological analyzer (probably from one of LKH's blogs), but it happened. And then I realized...

There's no good reason for half of the traits that authors give vampires. Even worse is when it comes from authors like LKH, who are convinced that they're doing everything in their power to make their vampires different. (It's especially bad when it comes to LKH, since she seems to be doing everything in her power not to make her characters genetically impossible.)

So, what am I talking about?

1. Why do vampires not have heartbeats? Yes, I know they're dead, but I thought that they were trying to counteract this by drinking blood. I'm not exactly sure for what purpose this blood functions, but based on what I've read it seems to be essentially for keeping the old human functions going. My point? How does the blood get where it's going without a heart to pump it? Am I to imagine that once a vampire drinks blood it just sits there in the veins and stagnates? Because just... eww.

2. Same thing goes for not breathing. Even if vampires don't need to oxygenate their stagnated blood, they still need it to talk and stuff. Even if the vocal cords are vibrating, they're almost pointless if you don't have the air to back it up. And considering the fact that they moan in bed means that the breathing's a habit. (Unless of course their thought process goes something like, "Oh, I feel like moaning. Guess I better breathe then, otherwise it's probably going to come up as a dry rasp.")

A ton of other things come to mind too, but I think these are the ones that annoy me the most and are the consistent throughout most of the urban vampire stuff I pick up now and again. I guess I wouldn't be so annoyed if LKH wasn't like, "MAI BIOLOGEE SKILLZ. LET ME SHOW YOU MY LACK OF THEM."

Any vampire traits you find annoying in Anita Blake/other vampire novels with all the bio babble trying to make the book look edgy?

Comments

[pearkiwi.livejournal.com]

1. It's been a while since I've read the books, but I'm fairly certain that the hearts do beat in the Anita books. The low powered ones can't make their heart beat on their own, while the Master vampires can. Because JC is the master of the city, it's his power that makes sure all the little vampire minions rise each night and have a heart beat.

In before someone else says it...Twilight, and vampires sparkling in the sun. WTF.

[othellia.livejournal.com]

Because JC is the master of the city, it's his power that makes sure all the little vampire minions rise each night and have a heart beat.

See, this would be cool if he used this power in reverse. Say a vampire betrayed him and ran away to hide somewhere in the city. No car chase. No mystery. Just... BAM! JC stops his heart and the vampire's body ceases to function.

But I suppose that's not metaphysical enough.

As for Twilight... well, Twilight is a unique case. Though the reflective properties of Twilight vampire skin could be related to the anti-reflective properties of vampires that can't be see in mirrors.

[sharkbytes.livejournal.com]

Well, a lot of typical "vampire" traits are symptoms of a disease (porphyria) and many people believe that the myth of vampires was at least inspired by the disease, and not understanding it correctly. So needing blood, aversion to sunlight, etc.

At any rate, I think a lot of modern authors stick to many of the tried and true traits because it's easier than creating an entire new mythos to build upon. It's a lot easier for a reader to recognize, for one.

[dan-lian.livejournal.com]

I was reading something--I want to say it was one of the delightfully trashy supernatural romances by Yasmin Galenorn--where a vamp is turned, and part of the "talking through it" they get by their maker is how they don't need to breathe anymore, but the body has to adjust, so remember you need to inhale/exhale, etc. It's very rare you see some authors addressing some of the biological bits, easier--as sharkbytes says--to use tried-and-true.

[brightlotusmoon.livejournal.com]

Oh, that reminds me -- what was Menolly's power before she became a vampire? Did the books ever explain that? I read that she had already been supernaturally acrobatic, but compared to a witch and a shapeshifter, that's... meh. I get that her current power is vampire, but what was her faerie born power?
(I only read part of her book so far.)

[wyrdmuse.livejournal.com]

If you don't mind grisly scenes or disturbing subject matter, you should pick up the graphic novel Preacher. One of the main characters is a vampire, except that he drinks and smokes without issue. He doesn't have typical fangs and human blood is more of a treat than a necessity (vampires can get by on animal blood). He loves garlic, holy symbols don't bother him and the only way to actually kill him is by sunlight. Oh, and he's not some "sexy" undead creature either--he's an ass.

[sharkbytes.livejournal.com]

SERIOUSLY. Preacher is awesome, I can't recommend it highly enough.

[pastygothchick.livejournal.com]

Personally, I find myself longing for the days when vampire were the bad guys. They drink human blood and kill people. I could stomach an evil manipulative vampire pretending to be something other than a monster to hide from humanity. Instead, we have poor angsty vampires whining about their lot in un-life. Ok, you hate the killing and blood drinking? Embrace the sun already.

What pissed me off about "The Killing Dance" was her moral outrage when Richard eats Marcus. I could see that being stomach turning, but she runs to a vampire. WTF? Doesn't he have to drink human blood to survive? So, cannibalism is ok if it's pretty or just a liquid diet?

[rodentfanatic.livejournal.com]

God, that's what really pissed me off big-time! The thing about eating Marcus, I mean.

And, yes, I too really fucking miss vampires who were actually SCARY. If I eve write my own vampire books, it's going to be with vampires being the result of a demon posessing a dead human body instead of the dead person just being themselves except for drinking blood and staying out of the sun now. Maybe the demons act like they're the person returned from the grave in oder to get close to victims...but they're realy not! Seriously, angsty vampires piss me right the fuck off. It's basically turned me off the genre.

[manekikoneko.livejournal.com]

I think you could write a whole book on why vampires became so sexual/sexy over the course of their mythology, although I think ultimately the answer is something like: to make them more human. To use them to examine the dark side of human nature, we have to identify with them, and rather than really explore their personalities it's just easier to let them have sex like people do. But that's way underplaying all the complicated motivations that have brought us to sexualize and glorify vampires, and it's just my point of view.

The Buffyverse actually had what I consider one of the more "plausible" explanations for vampires that could be expanded to include bodily functions; the idea that a vampire was a formless demon that took up residence in a nearly dead human body, evicting the human soul. You could suppose then that the demon is the one making things work on a metaphysical, non-biological level, I guess.

[pandaemonaeum.livejournal.com]

So, i guess it's more of two concerns: how did vampires turn so sexual

Manekikoneko has some good points on this.

I can only point it that it seems to start with Polidori's 'The Vampyre', where the main character, Ruthven, is clearly based on George Gordon, Lord Byron, who was infamous for practising free love in what was essentially a very restrained society in the 19th Century. So you get the layering of a man who is very sexualised by the media over what had, before then, mostly been a revenant (not much better than a zombie, really).

Subsequently, succeessive vampire novels have layered more and more sexuality onto the vampire in literature, from the transformation of Mina scene in Dracula right up to the oversexed vampires of LKH and her ilk. At some point in the 70s, the incubus/ succubus mythology of Western Europe becomes inseperable from the vampire mythology, and voila, vampires who can feed through sex and who have sex like human beings.

I'd like to blame Anne Rice, but her vampires are sensual, rather than sexual, and she blatantly talks about them not being able to have sex.

[easol.livejournal.com]

".... and how do they get erections if they're DEAD?"

Same question here.

LKH explains it away by saying that they drink blood and get instant erections, but that raises a whole slew of other questions. How the hell can they control where the blood goes in their bodies? Otherwise, they'd all (well, the male ones) get boners as soon as they drank blood. And what about the hormonal factor, since erections are not merely a matter of blood?

[manekikoneko.livejournal.com]

Re: 2.
It's dramatic effect to separate living from un-dead, pure and simple, and you're right: it's silly. OT of vampires, but they did this when they made one of the characters on Torchwood essentially a zombie. Emotionally, it did a lot of interesting things for the character, and it was supernatural so you can't really argue about the science. But they made a big deal about him not breathing anymore, and myself and a lot of my friends really hated that because he was still talking! Not only was he still talking, he was gasping and sighing and all sorts of other human things that rely on air flow without relying on oxygen content, and it bothered us that we, the lowly fans, noticed this right away and yet somehow the writers either didn't or didn't think we'd notice or care. Hello, the character was a doctor; ignoring the obvious was insulting to him and to viewers.

[pastygothchick.livejournal.com]

The fact that he could eat and drink but not digest they took into a projectile vomiting extreme of grossness. Agree about the annoying breathing thing.

[curseangel.livejournal.com]

The Torchwood thing was what I first thought of seeing this post, since I had a huge semi-scientific rant about it when I first saw "Dead Man Walking"/"A Day in the Death". None of their wannabiology actually makes sense - his blood isn't pumping through his veins? How is his brain still functional, then? Why would Martha say he needed to exercise to avoid muscle atrophy if, without pumping blood and all that good stuff, the muscles would atrophy anyway? And like you said-- how does a man scream if they can't breathe?

It's like I told my friend then: If you're gonna have it be magic and not make any sense, say it's magic and it won't make any sense. That's fine. Try and bring the science, and I'm gonna be pissed. :3

[othellia.livejournal.com]

Owen was turned into a zombie? I've only started watching Torchwood, so I'm just near the end of season one. Don't mind spoilers too much though since I'm mostly watching it for the Who references.

[relvetica.livejournal.com]

I recently realized during a conversation with a friend that vampires' fangs -- arguably their most defining trait -- make no sense at all. So... your teeth... grew? when you became a vampire? That is not how teeth work. They grow in and they just sort of hang out after that.

So I'd like to see a vampire story where, upon becoming infected or whatever with vampirism, the person's canine teeth fall out, and then they have to wait for their fangs to grow in. Like a kitten waiting out their milk teeth.

[keepsake]

I would LOVE to read that.

[rin-x-x.livejournal.com]

Its been beaten to death in every VtM forum I've been in.

Really, its suspension of belief. Its the only thing to it.

[othellia.livejournal.com]

I think the suspension of disbelief is best summed up in this Tv Tropes page. (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RuleOfCool) Or, in case you don't want to click on it in fear of spending hours on the site, The limit of the Willing Suspension Of Disbelief for a given element is directly proportional to its degree of coolness.

If a vampire story was incredibly awesome, I would be able to somewhat ignore the flaws. However, most vampire stories are mediocre at best. Also, I wouldn't mind so much if the author attributed it to magic and was done with it, but when they make a point of trying to bring up biology it just doesn't make sense.

[keepsake]

What really used to bother me a lot was the fact that Ricean vampires couldn't have sex. I mean, my biological knowledge is next to nothing, but isn't the main component there blood flow? And hormones. I don't think she ever explained it and it made absolutely no sense to me.

But then again, few things about Anne Rice make sense, period.

[manekikoneko.livejournal.com]

She never really got into why they couldn't have sex biologically, but the primary reason they didn't, as I understood it, was that all their bodily needs -- hunger, thirst, lust -- were replaced by blood lust. It threw back to the idea that vampires were a metaphor for sexual taboos without actual sex.

[easol.livejournal.com]

I wanna know how the damn blood they drink gets from the stomach to the circulatory system!

[othellia.livejournal.com]

I always thought the fangs were slightly hollow, and the blood would be sucked up through them, down a connected capillary or something, and into the circulatory system from there. Sort of like venom fangs, but in reverse.

But then again, I've been explaining it that way for years, so I tend to forget that it's not canon for every vampire story.

[dwg.livejournal.com]

Re: blood, vampire bat biologyis interesting to read up on. They have a specialised digestive system that allows them to process higher amounts of iron than other animals. If you think about it, if you eat too much bloody steak, you're gonna feel sick -- this is because a human body can't handle such a huge influx of iron.

I like to think that vampires undergo some basic modifications in the time that they're "dead" -- I really don't like to say that vampires are truly dead, just...pseudodead, they slip into a state of suspended animation where their bodily functions are so low, it looks like they're dead -- and one of them is the digestive system thing. The consequence of that is being able to eat and drink normal foods but unable to get the nutrients out of it. Cue violent sickness. The whole thing has to be terrible for a vampire, because hey, what if you get chocolate cravings? Do you do the whole Dogma thing where you sit and chew and then spit it out?

re: breathing -- yeah, basically you need to breathe to talk. The thing I loved about the 30 Days of Night movie was that the vampire speech was kind of stilted with the inhalation and exhalation coming in weird parts, like they weren't entirely sure how to get the air to work in conjunction with the words. Plus, it sounds positively creepy.

The whole fang issue, off the top of my head, is debatable depending on what version of the mythos you're looking at. Some versions of the story have them, other's don't. Some have Nosfuratu style fangs, there are some stories where the vampires have two fangs -- an upper and a lower -- on one side of the mouth to get that perfect puncture wound (think about it, if you have two upper fangs, there's no way to leave those dainty little holes in someone's throat -- WHERE IS THE HICKEY?).

I wrote a whole rant on vampires (http://community.livejournal.com/muse_abuse/2867.html) after the LKH hated Underworld post. It's a big huge list of things that kinda irk me.

[pandaemonaeum.livejournal.com]

I've actually written several rants on why the whole digestive system would have to change to absorb blood - a blood can act as an emetic, as soon as the clotting cascade starts, a human being will get sick - in response to people accusing goths/ vampire fans of drinking blood. It's not as easy as people think.

Desmodus is a good species to study if you are looking into some of the logistics of how the vampire's digestion or dentition could be made more efficient.

[longtail.livejournal.com]

Well, beyond the whole suspension of belief thing....

In the AB series at least, it seems to me that a vampire is it's own necromancer. Just as Anita needs blood in order to raise a zombie, a vampire needs some blood to "raise" itself. It was mentioned in the books that vampires don't drink enough in general to really hurt someone if they are just feeding, so I'm guessing they just do it because of the power, not the blood itself.

I'm guessing part of their magic goes to things like upkeep of the body, regenerating skin cells, hair, and so on, but they seem to be able to pick and choose whether to operate some bodily functions like breathing and heartbeat.

And in a few interviews LKH said she imagined that it would make sense for vampires to eliminate if they eat, but it's not something she feels the need to write about.

[amamelina.livejournal.com]

to be perfectly honest, modern vampire myths seem to be the ones with no heartbeat and no breathe. All the vampire myths I've read and origins of vampires (European vampires, Oriental hopping vampires, detatched torso vampires) don't mention such things. In fact, quite a few, including the Strigoi and Thahuelpuchi, have normal human lives. The Strigoi gain the ability to walk in the sun and have babies after seven years, and have two hearts (that beat). The Thahuelpuchi are born as vampires, protected by their family and shaman and can walk around in the daylight like a normal person.

European vampires are the precurser of our modern ideas. Some of their legends exist in our modern ones, but the more interesting things got lost (in my honest opinion).

Sorry, I've been researching and had no sleep.

[othellia.livejournal.com]

The Strigoi gain the ability to walk in the sun and have babies after seven years, and have two hearts (that beat).

Does that mean that the Strigoi are secretly Time Lords from Gallifrey? It would explain a lot.